


Making Friends

by SneakyHufflepuff



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-27
Updated: 2014-04-27
Packaged: 2018-01-21 00:07:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1530734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SneakyHufflepuff/pseuds/SneakyHufflepuff
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>From the prompt by crazy4orcas: Clint/Natasha -- he's glad she seems to be making friends with Steve and Sam.</p>
<p>In which Clint mooches around his apartment and drinks beer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Making Friends

The apartment Clint and Natasha share in New York is utterly nondescript on the outside, and far enough away from the former S.H.I.E.L.D. offices that they hadn’t felt the need to relocate after the Battle of New York or the emergence of HYDRA. It’s small, with no clear decorating scheme, but the apartment has always been been their place, the place where the rest of the world falls away. More importantly for Clint at the moment, it’s also the place where there’s beer.

Clint opens the front door, works through the security system on autopilot and grabs a beer from the fridge inside the space of thirty seconds. He checks the label on the bottle and sees that it’s from a local microbrewery. Natasha has given up on trying to get him to drink “real” alcohol, but still refuses to buy Budweiser. 

He opens the bottle on the edge of the counter, and heads to the living room to sprawl on the purple couch. It’s a relief to be off his feet after a long day trailing a mark. He doesn’t know what Hill is planning, but he’ll back her play, even if it takes him out of his perch. 

It’s only when he flicks on the television that he notices there is a post-it note stuck on the screen in what he thinks of as Natasha’s lazy handwriting, the one she writes without thinking about how it looks, it’s not perfectly neat or incredibly messy, it’s just hers, not Natalie’s or Natasha-the-perfect-agent. Clint begrudgingly gets up from the couch to snag the note, and almost drops it in surprise when he reads it. 

_Clint, gone shopping with Steve and Sam. Will be back around 5. Can I bring them back for dinner? Text me. - Nat_

No one knows about this apartment, not Fury, not Maria, no one. And now Natasha wants to pretend she and him are like a normal couple and invite people over for dinner? No. 

He reaches for his phone to text Nat his decision, before pausing. How much of his instinctive refusal is for security reasons and how much is out of some other emotion? He looks down at his hands, probing his emotions in a way he wouldn’t do for anyone else. It isn’t jealously, exactly. He’s not worried that Natasha is about to run off with either man, despite their attractiveness. He’s just surprised that Natasha would trust anyone else with this. 

Both he and Natasha put too many barriers up between their true selves and the rest of the world to have any close friends except for each other. Intellectually, he knows that isn’t a healthy way to live, but it has grown comfortable over the years. It’s a good thing that Natasha seems to be overcoming that. Hell, maybe he could make friends with this Falcon guy and bond over the bird code names. And he’d always liked Steve, from the few hours they’d spent together. 

_Sure, Cap and Sam can come over. I’ll throw something together._ Clint texts. Then, as an afterthought. _Can you bring more beer?_


End file.
